Microorganisms produce a myriad array of natural products or secondary metabolites that are of biomedical and biotechnological importance. However, the discovery and sustainable production of these compounds are often limited by our capability to manipulate the biosynthetic genes or clusters in either the native or the heterologous host. To overcome this key limitation in the natural product biosynthesis research area, the overall goal of the proposed research is to develop synthetic biology approaches for discovery, characterization, and engineering of phosphonic acid natural products in microorganisms. Specifically, we will focus on the engineering of the FR-900098 and fosfomycin biosynthetic pathways in heterologous hosts and development of new synthetic biology approaches for discovery of novel phosphonic acid natural products from sequenced genomes.